I built an AI thesis tool after ChatGPT invented 3 fake citations Posted on dev.to by Dom, founder of Academly.ai I finished my Bachelor's degree at 35. Married, one small kid, full-time job in IT. I still remember sitting at my desk at midnight, staring at a blank page, completely blocked. No idea how to structure my theoretical framework. No idea how to find the red thread in 40 PDFs of research material. That was before AI tools existed. I struggled through it manually. Fast forward a few years. I started helping a friend with her Master's thesis. She was using ChatGPT to speed up her literature review. Smart, I thought. Until she submitted a chapter to her supervisor. Three citations were completely invented. Not paraphrased incorrectly. Not cited from the wrong page. Invented from scratch. Plausible-sounding authors, realistic DOIs, publications that simply did not exist. Her supervisor flagged all three in the first paragraph. That was the moment I decided to build something different.…